A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
2020
Performance
Initially conceived in response to a request to create a ‘one minute sculpture’ as espoused by Erwin Wurm.
Single channel colour HD video with stereo camera sound
Cinematic screening: 2 min 41 sec
Erwin Wurm, speculated on how the restrictions of a sculpture could be overcome using everyday objects and limiting the sculpture’s life to only one minute. However, the weight of water and the length of time it took to empty the watering can were unexpected.
In this absurd action lurked conflicting, tangled, unsettling references: astrological Aquarius as a woman bearing the weight of water; the women and children who carry the world’s water; the stereotypes of purity and desire; the metaphors of forgetfulness, fecundity, of Biblical floods; the drowned women of a British Victorian imagination that haunts the site of this forest garden; the washing and watering, and our profligate expectations in the West.
Location: Forest Garden, Suffolk, UK
The Forest Garden Project is an ongoing act of quiet activism in protest and resistance against the demands of extraction and extinction associated with perpetual growth and expansion.
performance, absurdist action, water, mythology
© Sophie Standford